13 May 2024

There's no reason to 'embrace' AI in SEO

Filed under: AI | tech | SEO

When you embrace a person, it indicates a sense of love, warmth, comfort, and trust. Now imagine associating those feelings with AI. And then for SEO. It starts sounding weird and inadvisable.

But that’s exactly the kind of rhetoric I see on social media. The idea is that because AI is “here to stay” and it’s all interesting and exciting and kinda problematic but we can ignore that because of the interest and excitement that we need to coddle this technology else we fall behind.

But I disagree. I think adoption of AI tech is completely optional, even if Google is going ahead with things like Search Generative Experience (SGE)^[PDF]. I keep seeing SEOs clambering to test it out in its flawed infancy and trying to gain knowledge that isn’t there (and I’m not even referring to the AI itself!)

By all means satiate your curiosity but don’t assume any findings are immediately significant because Google holds all the cards and can change the rules at any minute.

There’s a lot of (boring) debate about AI’s effectiveness as a tooling technology. I’ve written a few bits about it being a starting point and something you should use as a last resort. None of those things require you to “embrace” it.

We should be focusing less on tech that we don’t know a lot about, that has environmental issues, that’s basically underpaid people of colour sat on each other’s shoulders in a giant trenchcoat, and more on the things that matter and are more proven to work.

We should be managing expectations and making things happen ourselves. Coddling a probabilistic bag of words without critical thought won’t get us there.