To fully understand the current question every business, entrepreneur, personal brand/content maker is asking…

Let’s look at it’s history and transformations.

This is an age old question, and how we do it has changed throughout history.

In the late 1800s businesses were well into the idea of reaching people in the quickest way possible. As the availability of phones increased, people found that they were lacking in the ability to find contact numbers for people and businesses.

A public need existed and as the norm for business, a solution was created. Phone directories, commonly known as phone books, began to grow in popularity.

The story goes, in 1883 a printer in Wyoming ran out of white paper as they were printing the local directory. To complete the deliverables, they switched to yellow paper and completed their work. Later in 1886, Reuben H. Donnelley took that mistake and created an official classified directory for businesses.

By the early 1900s, this grew into 2 separate directories, white pages for residential and yellow pages for commercial. This created the first major telephone-based directory that allowed individuals to do “searches” for businesses that they wanted. Here we can talk about things like the rise of Ads but that is a different matter.

To see more of this history check out the Library of Congress, search “Telephone Directory History” to find their digital content dating back to 1906 of over 3,000 pieces. https://www.loc.gov/collections/united-states-telephone-directory-collection/about-this-collection/

During this time frame of Yellow Pages dominance, many companies began to form with names like ‘AAA Mowing’ (no idea if that is/was a real company). This was down so that they would ‘rank’ earlier in each category so people would find them before competition.

Yellow Pages answered a simple question, who existed in the category I’m looking for?

The Yellow Pages stayed as the primary source of business searches throughout the 1900s. In 1990, Alan Emtage is credited with creating the first “internet search engine” at McGill University in Montreal. This search engine was not for the World Wide Web, but “local” files.

This idea of searches grew and took on several forms. In time, Google started working to optimize and rank it searches through PageRank in 1998. In more precise words, “Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998) (https://research.google/pubs/the-anatomy-of-a-large-scale-hypertextual-web-search-engine/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

With the rise of internet access and growth of the power house Google, population behavior shifted away from the convenient printings of the Yellow Pages and started “Googling” for information. Interestingly the phenomenon of a noun, Google, morphing into a verb, googling, is a strong indicator of the strength of a brand.

For more details on Google’s work and growth: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Google maintained the forefront of search engines until the early 2020s and the rise in popularity of AI for daily work and life.

Google (and SEO) answered a simple question, “Who is relevant in the category of what I’m looking for?”

As things do, the internet grew and spawned ways for people to connect with each other quickly and easily… Social Media. This through a wrench into early SEO because now people other than the business themselves could easily provide information on a business. This normalized the voice of every day people in the form of reviews, ratings, videos, etc. This is collectively known as user-generated content.

In response, Google did what Google does best and created business pages and ‘ranking’ system for people to leave their own thoughts and comments. Hello social proofing.

Social Media answered questions like, “Who do others follow in the category of what I’m looking for?” or “What is a good product for this problem?”

Every stage and change in history solves the same underlying problem of how to help people discover businesses and information. Each advancement of technology is an evolution of what came before. Understanding this progression makes it easier to understand how AI is enhancing an opportunity for enhancing optimization practices structured on the foundation of SEO.

During the dominating time frame of “googling” data, businesses learned that ranking was extremely important. As such, a focus on optimization began and grew. This obviously gave rise to SEO ‘strategies’. It is important to remember “googling” is still very much an important part of daily human behavior in America.

Then once again, the internet grew and AI tools and resources became popular and widely used. Now people began to use Large Language Models (LLMs) AI systems like ChatGPT to get their work done, research information, and find data.

The answer, significantly but probably not in the way you think. AI search and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) answers a different question than the previous resources. “What is the answer to ‘xyz’ in the category of what I’m looking for?”

Note that AEO is a process of optimizing your work and content for AI systems and modules like Alexa and ChatGPT.

AI is about quality of answers and authority. The question shouldn’t be about “How can I get buzz words into a blog?” or “How can I get backlinks?”, instead it should be “How can I answer a question, with quality, that is being asked by my target audience?”

In my humble opinion.
NO. AI is not now, nor will it be, a full replacement of SEO. Instead, it is an enhancement of it. Do backlinks still matter, Yes; just not as much. Do ‘buzz words’ matter? No. Quality of a complete and accurate answer is far more important than a trend. Do keywords matter? Yes, just don’t stuff them like a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Use them as a tool to build a masterpiece.

The Yellow Pages still exist. Google them. See, SEO didn’t replace Yellow Pages, it enhanced them into a new format. SEO isn’t going away, AI is just enhancing it.

That is dependent on how you previously approach SEO. Did you just focus on trends, buzz words, links, and etc? I would make a shift to do the same but instead of trends and buzz words focus on quality answers to real questions.