“SEO is dead”, you often hear since ChatGPT arrived. Our take? Calm. SEO is not dead, AI actually makes it more important. Because an AI answer is exactly as reliable as the sources beneath it, and those sources are still ranked by the search engine.
The numbers: search shifts, but doesn’t disappear
A few facts to put it in perspective. ChatGPT reached around 800 million weekly users by late 2025, while Google keeps growing. At the same time click behaviour is changing: research by Pew Research shows that on a results page with an AI summary, people click a regular link in only 8% of cases, against 15% without, nearly a halving. Yet Google still processes around 14 billion searches a day and remains by far the biggest; AI chatbots combined are still only a fraction of the search market. The shift is real, but search doesn’t disappear, it changes form.
What changes
More answers come directly in the search results or the AI overview, so not every query still leads to a click. We call that zero-click. At the same time the amount of content is exploding: a large majority of marketers use generative AI to create material, and a big share of new web pages now contains AI content. Content has become much cheaper to produce, sometimes several times cheaper than by hand. The result: much more noise, and so distinctiveness, real experience and your own insight count more heavily than ever.
What stays the same
The fundamentals don’t shift. SEO still rests on three pillars: strong content, authority (links and mentions) and a healthy technical foundation. In fact: AI leans on it. AI assistants don’t care about backlinks as such, but they do care about mentions and trustworthiness. And people still want the same: clarity, comparison, confirmation and a reliable answer. Only the packaging changes.
Grounding: why this is actually good news
This is the heart of it. AI assistants ground their answers on existing, reliable sources, and those sources come from the search results. An AI often does a search itself to back up its answer, and picks the pages that already rank well. So whoever ranks well and has built trust automatically gets cited more often in AI answers. Your SEO work works twice: in the classic search engine and as fuel for the AI answer. That’s exactly why investing in SEO now pays off more, not less.
De cijfers achter grounding
Dat klinkt logisch, maar het is inmiddels ook gemeten. ChatGPT haalt zijn webresultaten nog altijd grotendeels uit de index van Bing; OpenAI’s eigen VP Engineering bevestigde dat kort in een AMA: “We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.” Google’s AI Overviews en AI Mode putten uit de Google-index. Een AI-antwoord begint dus bij een zoekopdracht, en daarmee bij de vraag of jij daar goed voor rankt.
De overlap is fors. Ahrefs analyseerde 1,9 miljoen citaties uit AI Overviews en vond dat 76% van de geciteerde pagina’s in de organische top 10 van Google staat. seoClarity kwam bij 362.000 zoekwoorden op een overlap van 90 tot 94% met de organische toppositie, en Semrush mat voor Perplexity een domein-overlap van ruim 91% met de Google-top-10. Wie goed rankt, heeft een flinke voorsprong in het AI-antwoord.
Eén nuance, want anders beloven we te veel: een toppositie is geen garantie. Ahrefs noemt de samenhang zelf “positive yet moderate”, en voor lange, specifieke vragen loopt de overlap met je exacte Google-ranking terug tot 12%, omdat een AI een vraag opsplitst in meerdere deelzoekopdrachten (query fan-out). Daarnaast komt een fors deel van de citaties van platforms als Reddit en Wikipedia. Goed ranken is de ondergrens om mee te doen, niet de eindstreep.
GEO and SEO are not competitors
Generative Engine Optimization doesn’t replace SEO, it’s a deepening of it. They’re intertwined: strong SEO is the foundation AI visibility builds on. Whoever now chooses between “SEO or AI” is asking the wrong question. It’s both-and. We wrote about it separately in how GEO works en how AI Mode changes the search world.
SEO is not dead. AI makes it more important, because an AI answer is as reliable as the sources beneath it.
Giacomo Perticara, founder and SEO strategist at GRP Digital
What you can do now
- Invest in strong, expert-written content on topics you really know (E-E-A-T).
- Don’t block AI crawlers in robots.txt and make sure your content is readable (the visibility gap).
- Optimise for search engines and AI findability at the same time (GEO).
- Build brand mentions beyond your own site: PR, communities, niche media.
- Use AI tools to automate routine SEO, so you free up time for strategy.
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO still worth it now that AI is here? Yes, more than ever. AI grounds on well-ranking sources, so strong SEO immediately increases your chance of appearing in AI answers.
Do I have to choose between SEO and GEO now? No. GEO is a deepening of SEO, not a replacement. The foundation is the same.
Do I lose traffic to AI Overviews? For some informational queries, yes. But you gain visibility and mentions at the moment people make a choice; so measure more broadly than just clicks.
Calm, strategy, and the basics in order
AI changes the form of search, not the need beneath it. Whoever has the basics in order, content, authority and technology, wins in the classic search engine and in the AI answer.
Curious how your brand is doing in both Google and AI? At GRP Digital we map it and build findability that lasts.
Sources: Pew Research (AI Overviews and click behaviour), OpenAI (800 miljoen wekelijkse ChatGPT-gebruikers), het Datos & SparkToro-zoekmarktonderzoek, Ahrefs en seoClarity (overlap AI-citaties en organische ranking), en de OpenAI AMA (Bing als zoekbron).
