Artificial intelligence has taken over the SEO industry in recent months. With the emergence of AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, which can understand and perform all kinds of (SEO) tasks, an ever-lasting question is once again finding its way into lots of headlines: Is the SEO industry dying? First, if you're impressed with ChatGPT and think it may be threatening SEO, you may be surprised to know that according to the tool itself, the SEO industry is going to be just fine: AI may change the way SEO is done, but it is unlikely to replace the entire profession. While AI can automate certain aspects of SEO, such as keyword analysis and technical site audits, it still requires human expertise and creativity to develop and implement effective strategies. Additionally, search engines themselves are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated, making them a moving target for AI to keep up with.

Here's an example of some listicles I created for the topic "quality blog content" using this tool: As you can see, if I wanted to write an article on this topic, I can use some of these suggestions as an outline for my post. With these, I can focus instead on researching the individual sub-topics. Here's another example of some website taglines that I created for Moz by entering the brand name and a brief description of "The Ultimate SEO tool you can trust" into the tool: If you were starting a new brand as an SEO, you can use NLG tools such as this, to discover awesome taglines to use for your brand. TF*IDF stands for "Term Frequency times Inverse Document Frequency". This measures how you use a term on a particular page and how it compares to a collection of pages for that specific keyword.

For roughly a decade, the SEO industry has been consistently moving further away from discussions about the internal workings of the search engines, starting around the time of the first Panda update. This decision to focus on more strategic and long-term SEO approaches has been a positive one, overall. Marketing strategies built entirely on the whims of a search engine aren't built to stand the test of time. However, there's no denying the value that came from understanding and predicting how search engines would react to certain kinds of tweaks to the HTML or to the backlink profile in the early days of SEO. Most of us have assumed that those days ended when Google embraced machine learning.

With Google turning to artificial intelligence to power its flagship search engine business, has the SEO industry been left in the dust? The old ways of testing and measuring are becoming antiquated, and industry insiders are scrambling to understand something new -- something which is more advanced than their backgrounds typically permit. The fact is, even Google engineers are having a hard time explaining how Google works anymore. With this in mind, is artificial intelligence changing the SEO industry for better or worse? And has Google's once-understood algorithm become a "runaway algorithm?"