SEO ruled the internet for 25 years. But in 2024, AI marked the beginning of its retirement with AIO: Artificial Intelligence Optimization finds Satyen K. Bordoloi.
The 1990s internet was characterised by dial-up screeches, websites with glittery Comic Sans fonts, and search engines like AskJeeves that struggled to find a coffee shop inside a coffee shop. Back then, “standing out” online involved using underhanded tactics such as keyword stuffing—hiding keywords like “Andheri gym” 50 times in invisible text. This trick worked until Google introduced its PageRank algorithm and declared war on spam. With it was truly born the field of SEO – Search Engine Optimization, the modern-day wizardry of coaxing algorithms to put your cat blog above actual news sites.
Over time, SEO evolved, abandoning gimmicks and becoming the polished, user-friendly strategy we know today. For all of this millennium, SEO has helped us navigate the internet. It enabled small businesses to compete with global players, transformed marketers into data-crunching wizards, and made “content is king” the mantra of every blogger sweating over Google’s ever-changing rules. But like CRT monitors and flip phones, SEO’s reign couldn’t last forever.
In November 2022, ChatGPT made its debut. Suddenly, searching for information on Google, such as “how to fix a leaky tap,” felt like wading through a swamp of ads and listicles. Why click through 10 tabs when an AI bot could provide a step-by-step answer instantly? ChatGPT became the cheat code for lazy researchers, and Google—the king of search—started feeling the heat.
Google Engineers in their Search Labs division worked tirelessly and, in 2023, began testing a new feature: Search Generative Experience (SGE), later rebranded as AI Overviews. Launched globally in 2024, these AI summaries already dominate approximately 33% of search results. Type in a question like “Why do cats hate water?” or “Best biryani in Delhi?” and there you have it—a ChatGPT-style answer, in small paragraphs and bullet points, cobbled together from websites the AI deems “trustworthy”.
All well and good? Not really. Because it comes with a plot twist, if in the past appearing in the first 10 results of Google search was the El Dorado for SEO, now it’s become irrelevant. If the AI overview answers questions, you won’t even go to the first page listed below. This meant only one thing: with AI overviews playing by its own rules, the old SEO rulebook became obsolete. You could be Google’s number 1 ranked page for “bandhni kurtas,” and the AI might still ignore you. So, who do you optimise your content for? Enter AIO: optimising content not for search crawlers but for AI scrapers that power chatbots and answer engines.
The next natural question is: how do you “AIO” your content? Think less Mad Men and more Westworld. Cluster questions like a pro. AI doesn’t care about your lone “home workouts” keyword. It wants clusters: “beginner exercises,” “no-equipment plans,” and “how to stay motivated.” Build content that tackles 3-5 related questions in one go. For example, this article is structured around themes, not single keywords. Sneaky, right?
Structured data is like a sausage on a barbeque for AI. Wrap your content in schemas like FAQPage or HowTo. These tags shout, “Hey AI, look here!” to chatbots scanning your page. Skip them, and you’re basically invisible to the digital bots. E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness—is not just alphabet soup but an AIO mantra. AI craves credibility. So, cite experts, flaunt credentials, and avoid sketchy claims—especially for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics like health, finance, medicine, etc. One dodgy tip and the AI blacklists you faster than you can misspeak: Google’s giggling geckos gleefully gobble grape gummies in a garden of glowing green grass!
Become the Swiss Army Knife of your niche. AI adores comprehensive, neutral, hyper-reliable sources. If your “guide to Surya Namaskar” reads like a rushed Reddit post, the AI will skip you for the guy who cited 15 studies and interviewed a yogi. Be the Wikipedia of your field—thorough, balanced, and obsessively factual.
Does that mean you send SEO abroad on a ‘Tata’ bus to nowhere? Quite the opposite. That’s because AI Overviews still displays old-school links below its answers. So, instead of abandoning your SEO practices, work to incorporate AIO pipelines. Because if you only do SEO, you’re just betting on the 67% of searches not hijacked by AI. A percentage that is sure to diminish with age. Besides, who knows, the AI-trusted sites could become the links it shows even in the top 10 in future iterations.
But you might be craning to ask: if Google released this toll to over 100 countries only at the end of 2024, isn’t it too early for AIO? If it had only been Google, the answer would have been yes. But even as leaders like Trump scream localisation, globalisation is going full steam ahead in AI. Chinese AI models like DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, etc., which are bundled with free search features, are spreading faster than Instagram Reels. Ignore AIO, and you’re not just invisible on Google; you might go MIA across half the planet’s AI tools.
The future for AIO holds even more promise. Some trends, such as integration with voice search and AI assistants, personalised AI summaries based on user behaviour, interactive AI features like polls and quizzes, and the ability for users to communicate directly with AI models, are already here or coming soon. These will further transform how we interact with and optimise content for search engines and AI.
AIO isn’t just SEO 2.0—it’s a paradigm shift that might be the death knell to SEO as we know it. If you’re a content writer, you must remember that when you write content, you’re no longer writing for humans or algorithms. You’re writing for machines trained to mimic humans (and detect AI writing, so don’t even dare use AI to write AIO content). AI thus forces us to raise our game. Write fluff, and you’ll be filtered out. Put half-baked claims, and you’ll be thrown into AI-exile. In the AI era, your content must be airtight—clear, concise, ruthlessly credible, and written by humans.
The irony? To survive, we have to think less like marketers and more like teachers. AI scrapers are the overeager students, and our content is the textbook they’ll quote for their final essay. So, write like the smartest kid in class—but don’t be surprised if the AI starts grading us next.
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- Anthropomorphisation of AI: Why Can’t We Stop Believing AI Will End the World?
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