How AI and Social Media Are Redefining SEO in 2024

“The only constant in life is change,” said Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. It’s 2024, and this statement has never been truer, especially in the marketing world. From artificial intelligence to shifting social media trends, the dizzying speed at which changes happen in this space is the only thing many marketers are certain about in the digital age. But what do the constant changes mean for digital marketers, particularly those focused on search engine optimization (SEO)? Is SEO dead?

Recent research by Benchmark Groups suggests otherwise. “Search engine optimization relies on three truths to remain relevant: search engines must exist, your audience must use search engines, you must be able to influence whether or not your content appears in search results,” the team points out.

Based on those factors alone, entrepreneur Gal Erlichman of marketing integration solution PESO believes SEO is “alive and thriving” because search engines are still very much around. Add in the data—62% of businesses plan to increase their SEO investments while only 2% plan to decrease them—and the case for SEO services remains strong.

However, PESO’s CRO Chris Berry also states that there’s no denying that shifting algorithms and trends have made effective SEO more difficult.

“The advent of generative AI and intelligent marketing tools presents marketers with a considerable advantage,” notes PESO’s COO Rob Vegas. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, “The future of B2B marketing lies in the hands of those who can seamlessly blend human creativity with the transformative capabilities of AI.”

And to those at PESO, this impact is already being felt. Since Google’s March Core Update, many marketers have lost significant traffic and income, with AI often cited as the culprit. “We’re strengthening our policy to focus on [this] abusive behavior—producing content at scale to boost search ranking—whether automation, humans, or a combination are involved,” Google had previously announced. “This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.”

Marketing veteran Hardy Kalisher thinks the future of SEO is already taking shape. “Google search’s death won’t be because Google figured out how to punish the black hat SEO specialist gaming search results,” he remarks. “Rather, it will be because users abandon how search is done as we know it.”

Kalisher notes that he’s been hearing that SEO is dead every year since 1997, but that’s not happened yet. The current wave of change is far from cresting, and it’s clear that more shifts are coming. In response, search experts must adopt new strategies to future-proof their businesses.

“Good marketing is the magical intersection of delivering the right message (content) to the right person (digital users) at the right time (on the device they are using),” Kalisher notes. “Clearly, that magical intersection is moving away from Google and towards TikTok and likely future evolutions of digital platforms.”