Is SEO Dead or Just Evolving for LLMs
The "AIO" Pivot: Is SEO Dead or Just Evolving for LLMs? 1. Introduction: The Structural Metamorphosis of Information Retrieval The digital economy stands at a precipice of a transformation so fundamental that it rivals the initial transition from directory-based navigation to algorithmic search in the late 1990s. For nearly a quarter of a century, the primary mechanism of online discovery has been predicated on a specific transactional contract: a user inputs a keyword string, an algorithm retrieves a list of relevant documents, and the user selects a destination. This "search-and-click" model fostered the multi-billion dollar industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a discipline dedicated to reverse-engineering the retrieval heuristics of major search engines, principally Google. However, the rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the core infrastructure of information retrieval—exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Google’s AI Ov...