Do SEOs even feel like SEOs anymore?
Saw a post this week from someone in the industry. They said they've been an SEO for eight years, and lately, they feel like any junior with an AI agent can match their output. The post got huge. A lot of people quietly feel the same .
It hit a nerve. Because the shift has been real. And fast.
What's changed
For twenty years, SEO was about keywords, rankings, and links. You optimized pages for a search engine, you built backlinks, you climbed the SERPs. That was the job .
That job still exists. But it's no longer the only one.
Generative AI has introduced a second, parallel layer of discovery. One where answers are synthesized, not retrieved. Where visibility depends not on ranking, but on whether an AI system understands, trusts, and cites your expertise .
Traditional SEO is now about maintaining technical health and training signals. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about building a semantic footprint that makes your expertise undeniable to LLMs. The industry is splitting .
The identity crisis
Neha Agarwal put it bluntly on LinkedIn. Every SEO professional suddenly became an "AI SEO Specialist". The profiles now say GEO Expert, AEO Strategist, LLM Visibility Consultant. She called it what it is: insecurity. An identity crisis. We're terrified of being seen as "old-school" .
But here's the tension. GEO isn't even a defined discipline yet. LLMs are changing week by week. How can anyone be an expert in something the industry hasn't fully understood?
Yet brands expect us to be.
What the job market says
The data tells a clearer story. Companies aren't abandoning SEO. They're layering AI skills on top .
A study of 2025–2026 job postings found that dedicated Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) positions showed up in 14% of roles—roles that simply didn't exist two years ago .
The roles are evolving. The fundamentals are not.
What job descriptions now ask for:
Entity management over keyword targeting
Schema markup as a brand asset
Understanding how LLMs build memory and trust
Optimizing for AI citations, not just blue-link ranking
Agent-ready site architecture
What they still ask for:
Technical audits
Content strategy aligned with intent
GA4 and Search Console analysis
Technical SEO hasn't disappeared. It's just serving a dual audience. You aren't just optimizing for a Google crawler anymore. You're optimizing for LLMs that "scrape" and "digest" your site to provide citations .
The exhaustion is real
One SEO professional said it plainly: "I'm the SEO, the paid guy, the social manager, the email person, the designer, and the analyst, and I'm good at exactly none of them anymore" .
The role has expanded. The title hasn't. Practitioners are exhausted .
What this means
The internet is changing. Search is changing. The role is changing.
We don't need to pretend to be experts in a field that's still being invented. We need to be honest. We need to learn. We need to experiment. And slowly, we will evolve. From SEOs to whatever shiny new title this world gives us .
The future isn't human versus AI. It's humans who know how to direct systems versus humans who don't .
What I'm curious about
Do you feel like an SEO anymore? Or does the title feel like it belongs to a different era?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
Replies
I agree with most of your points. SEO isn't dying, but the way we optimize content is definitely changing. Technical SEO, structured data, entities, and content quality still matter because they help both search engines and AI models understand context. The biggest shift is that we're no longer creating content only for Google's ranking signals. We're also creating content that AI platforms can confidently interpret, summarize, and reference.
I've been seeing the same trend in my own work. Recently, I rebuilt one of my websites with a strong focus on AEO, GEO, entity optimization, schema markup, and LLM-friendly content structure instead of relying only on traditional SEO. The goal wasn't just to rank in Google, but to make the content easier for platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to understand as well. It has been interesting to see how content structure changes when you optimize for both search engines and AI assistants.
I think the future belongs to people who combine solid SEO fundamentals with AI-first optimization rather than treating them as two separate strategies.
@robert_collins7 For me, SEO feels completely different now. I'm spending more time understanding people than chasing rankings, and that's not a bad thing.
@robert_collins7 I've noticed SEO isn't what it used to be. I'm focusing more on solving real problems because that's where I see better long-term results
Really well put. There are very different levels of “SEO experts.” Tools like Yoast and now AI agents have made the basics accessible to almost anyone, but true SEO expertise is still rare.
Knowing what to change is one thing. Understanding why it matters, how it affects the bigger picture, and how search behavior is evolving is a completely different skill. SEO is definitely changing, but I don’t think deep expertise is becoming less valuable. If anything, it may become even more important.
the part that feels genuinely new to me isn't the skill shift, it's the measurement problem. with Google you could rank-track, A/B test titles, watch a position move week to week. with an LLM citing you or not, there's no dashboard, no stable ranking to check, and the model changes under you without warning. Robert's point about restructuring for AEO/GEO is right, but even if you do everything right you're mostly inferring whether it worked from anecdotal "I asked ChatGPT and we showed up" checks. that's a much harder feedback loop to build a career of expertise around than "keyword rank went from 14 to 3"
i agree that the workload has grown beyond one. should businesses rethink expectations and build smaller specialist teams so quality improves instead of stretching one person too thin?