SEO in the Age of AI: Why It’s More Alive Than Ever
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
From Yahoo and Altavista to Google domination, and now ChatGPT and AI-driven search ~ SEO has never been more relevant.
SEO never really went away. But with the rise of AI, LLMs, and conversational search, it’s having a full-on renaissance. It’s no longer just about Google Rankings, it’s about being the source LLMs rely on. And guess what? The fundamentals still win.
🚀 The Roots: Yahoo, Altavista & DMOZ
Let’s rewind. In the early days, SEO meant optimizing websites for search engines like Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, and the legendary DMOZ directory. The internet was smaller, slower, and way more chaotic. Ranking higher often just meant stuffing your page with keywords and hoping the bots would bite. It was like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck.
Then came Google. And everything changed.
🎯 The Golden Age of Google: Chasing That #1 Spot
As Google rose to dominance, SEO morphed into something more focused, more competitive, and more intense. Suddenly, we weren’t just optimizing for any search engine. We were optimizing for the search engine.
This was the age of “GRO”: Google Ranking Optimization. Everyone wanted to be on Page 1, Position 1. Tactics ranged from clever to downright shady. Remember keyword cloaking? Link farms? Spinning articles? The early 2000s were a digital Wild West. Black hat SEO thrived…until it didn’t.
As Google got smarter, so did SEOs. What was once considered black hat turned white hat. Some even argue the grey zone never really left. But the savvy SEOs adapted, embraced algorithm changes, and mastered the art of doing the right things for the right reasons. Not just for rankings, but for real users.
🤖 The AI Era: Search Starts Over
And now here we are. In the era of AI, LLMs, and conversational search. Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI-powered assistants are changing how people find information. It’s not just about “Googling” anymore. People are querying differently. They expect answers, not just links.
Yet while the interface and interaction modes have changed, the core idea of SEO remains critical. Only now, we’re optimizing for a different kind of engine.
And let’s be clear: while user-first content is important, I still firmly believe you need to optimize for bots first. SEO has always been about understanding how machines interpret content, structure, and signals. And in the era of AI, that understanding matters even more. Clean, structured, crawlable content is what fuels these LLMs and powers quality results.
📌 What Still Works (and Works Better Than Ever)
In this new landscape, it’s the fundamentals that shine:
- On-page SEO: Clear structure, compelling content, and semantic relevance.
- Technical SEO: Fast-loading pages, proper indexing, schema, canonical tags, and accessibility.
- Content quality: Writing that makes sense to users, but is also semantically rich for algorithms.
- Experience: UX, Core Web Vitals, and mobile-first design.
You don’t need to overthink it. Just use common sense, and make things understandable for both humans and bots.
🎉 Why This Is Fun (Again)
What makes this moment thrilling is that we’re back to uncharted territory, just like the early days. New SERPs. New channels. New behaviors. And with AI constantly reshaping how and where search happens, we get to learn and evolve all over again.
SEO didn’t die. It leveled up.
It transformed; and now it’s more alive, dynamic, and essential than ever before.
🛠️ Verbolia Was Built for This
At Verbolia, we’ve quietly been preparing for this moment for 7 years.
Our scalable, high-performance, perfectly optimized pages (generated via our solution Vpage) have always focused on doing the fundamentals right.
And now? Now, AI is validating what we’ve been doing all along.
👉 We did the analysis: our customers’ pages are showing up in LLM answers to transactional and conversational queries, as trusted sources. Why? Because the structure, content, and speed of their Vpages align perfectly with how AI models evaluate relevance.
Example of transactional query for CHANEL on Perplexity.
Example of transactional query for PrettyLittleThing on Google AI Mode.
Example of transactional query for Decathlon on ChatGPT.
We weren’t adapting to the future. We were already building it.
💬 Let’s Discuss
What do you think about this new era of SEO? Are you seeing your content in AI results? How are you adapting your strategy?
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