“SEO is dead”, you've often heard 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, versus 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 contain 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. LLMs 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. LLMs ground their answers on existing, reliable sources, and those sources come from the search results. An LLM 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 does double duty: in the traditional search engines engine and as fuel for the AI answer. That’s exactly why investing in SEO now pays off more, not less.
The numbers behind grounding
That sounds logical, but it's now been measured too. ChatGPT still pulls its web results largely from Bing’s index; OpenAI’s own VP of Engineering confirmed it briefly in an AMA: “We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.” Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the Google index. An AI answer therefore starts with a search query, and with the question of whether you rank well for it.
The overlap is substantial. Ahrefs analysed 1.9 million citations from AI Overviews and found that 76% of the cited pages sit in Google’s organic top 10. seoClarity found an overlap of 90 to 94% with the organic top position across 362,000 keywords, and Semrush measured a domain overlap of over 91% with the Google top 10 for Perplexity. If you rank well, you have a solid head start in the AI answer.
One nuance, because otherwise we would be promising too much: a top position is no guarantee. Ahrefs itself calls the relationship “positive yet moderate”, and for long, specific questions the overlap with your exact Google ranking drops to 12%, because an LLM splits a question into multiple sub-queries (query fan-out). On top of that, a sizeable share of the citations comes from platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia. Ranking well is the entry ticket, not the finish line.
GEO and SEO work together
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 visibility” 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.
What the numbers do not show is the pace. When I started in SEO in 2017, new result types were being added every year too, and click-throughs were slowly declining. That happened in small steps. The shift I saw over the past year is roughly what I used to see happen over four years. The direction is not new, the speed is.
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 visibility 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. LLMs draw 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 right
AI changes how people search, not the need beneath it. Whoever has the basics right, content, authority and technical SEO, wins in the traditional search engines engine and in the AI answer.
Curious how your brand is doing in both Google and AI answers? At GRP Digital we map it and build visibility that lasts.
Sources: Pew Research (AI Overviews and click behaviour), OpenAI (800 million weekly ChatGPT users), the Datos & SparkTorosearch market study, Ahrefs en seoClarity (overlap between AI citations and organic rankings), and the OpenAI AMA (Bing as a search source).
