How Artificial Intelligence is Changing SEO

As artificial intelligence (AI) has seen rapid development and growth over the past two years, AI technology has shifted the process for content ideation, web design, and much more. Possibly the most noticeable change for marketers has come to organic search. 

AI has fundamentally changed Google search, with the addition of AI Overviews along with deep language detection to better understand search intent. However, Google’s changes aren’t the only shifts in the search industry.

With the launch of ChatGPT and other AI assistants like Claude and Perplexity, people are going directly to AI to ask their questions. Because of this, search is possibly undergoing its largest transformation since its founding days in the 1990s. Naturally, this is shifting search engine optimization (SEO) and the strategies that need to be taken into account in order to be found online.

While the main question of SEO used to be “How do I rank high on Google?,” the goal is now to find out how to show up everywhere that people are asking questions.

The shifts in SEO aren’t easy to navigate, but throughout my internship at Trekk, I’ve learned a lot about the current state of affairs and industry shake-ups. So, my goal for this article is to walk you through what our agency has learned about 2025 SEO and what to do about it.

Quit keyword stuffing

First and foremost, search engines better understand the meaning and intent behind queries. And while answering a user’s question has always been the ultimate goal of search, artificial intelligence can separate pages that truly answer the searcher’s questions from those that stuff keywords throughout the page without giving useful information.

That being said, keyword stuffing is dead — and it has been for a long time. While Trekk has been advising against this since 2014, the penalty for keyword stuffing is now greater than ever. 

Now that Google has a greater understanding of intent with the addition of its AI filtration systems, making high-quality content is more important than ever. 

For more in-depth information on how to approach content marketing in the modern age, check out our article from January discussing what’s changed with search and how to optimize your content for it.

Google and AI assistants want the same thing: high-quality content

Considering the importance of making high-quality content, it’s necessary to define what quality really means in the eyes of Google and AI assistants.

For starters, Google’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) criteria is still the main framework that the search engine uses to filter out “quality” content from lower-quality websites, so it’s still in your best interest to follow that closely. Furthermore, AI assistants like ChatGPT use a similar algorithm.

Simply put, following E-E-A-T is just ingraining said qualities into your writing. With expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, you need to make your information reliable, insightful and knowledgeable. However, the newest addition to the criteria, experience, is a bit different. This prioritizes content written by a human that offers a unique, valuable perspective and first-hand experience. Writing in the first person and offering an experienced perspective also helps with your AI search SEO, as assistants like ChatGPT use natural language processing (NLP) to filter through the tone and voice of your writing. That being said, don’t have generative AI create your content for you.

Implement longtail keywords for AI search

In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of conversational search; because of technological developments, people are searching in natural, conversational language. For example, long-tail searches like “what’s the best place to get coffee near me?” are rising in popularity. According to Moz, these long-tail keywords make up approximately 75% of searches. 

There’s a few reasons for this, but the rise of voice search, AI assistants, and Google’s AI Overviews have played a large part in this trend, and new tools are still evolving. To add to this, BrightEdge reports a 700% increase in searches with eight or more words since the launch of AI Overviews in May 2024.

SEO is shifting toward longer, more conversational keywords, so implementing them into page titles, meta descriptions, and headings are likely to help your rankings.

Furthermore, keyword research remains important to your SEO strategy. You’d be well off to be using tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” and AnswerThePublic to closely monitor longtail keywords relevant to your content.

Structure your pages for easy AI review

If you want your website to be cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, you’ll need to make your webpage and its content easy for AI engines to crawl and synthesize.

First, you need to lay a foundation for AI (and search engines) to understand what your content is about. This comes in the form of schema markup, or structured data, which provides explicit context as to what your content is. At the base level, be sure to include appropriate core schemas, like “Article,” “Blog,” or “Product” on all of your pages. Along with this, AI will appreciate if your schema details all relevant properties about your page.

For example, if you publish a blog post on your website, you’d want to include detailed structured data so Google and AI crawlers can understand every little property of your page, including the author’s headshot, the headings, video properties, links, and body text. These practices raise the likelihood that your content appears in Google’s knowledge panels and AI Overviews. 

However, it’s important to keep in mind that having detailed schema markup can be time-consuming, and its importance generally depends on the nature of your web page. On one hand, detailed structured data could be very important for e-commerce businesses with lots of product pages, as such pages are likely to have less written content for crawlers to navigate. On the other hand, detailed schema may not be worthwhile for pages like blog posts which have a ton of written content for AI to browse.

One way to circumvent this issue is to build your website on a platform with built-in schema markup. At Trekk, our solution is HubSpot. 

Monitor AI prompts like they’re keywords

As the search world splits up between engines and AI assistants, standard keyword research doesn’t account for prompts entered into chatbots. That being said, it’s important to monitor both keywords and AI prompts moving forward.

While there aren’t nearly as many tools to monitor prompt volume as there are keywords, tools like AthenaHQ, XFunnel, or Scrunch AI can do this while also following brand mentions, competitor mentions, and the AI platforms’ overall sentiment toward your brand and product. 

Keeping track of such data can be a huge help to you as you try to accumulate a broad understanding of how AI perceives and understands your brand.

Finally, put customers first

The rapid development of AI is yet another big change to the ever-changing world of search engine optimization. As AEO/GEO is in its infancy, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and hyperfocus on your results with AI engines, since they are likely the future of search.

However, it’s important to keep the big picture in mind by monitoring the entire landscape of search, its history, your goals, and most importantly, your audience.

Trekk is navigating AI search SEO with the rest of you. Yet, I’ve noticed that the agency’s  overall purpose remains the same — to create content for humans, not artificial intelligence. Customers come first.