AI is threatening traditional SEO by driving traffic away from Google to AI models, and smaller publishers could be even harder hit.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that AI will make SEO harder for smaller publishers. He said that larger brands would be able to continue to get organic traffic because of their name recognition, but smaller sites — which had worked on their SEO for years to get their traffic — could struggle.
“A lot of studies have come out recently showing that AI search engines like Perplexity drive a lot less traffic to websites,” Srinivas was asked in a conference by a participant. “So I’m curious, what do you think like the web will look like in five to 10 years when a lot of these websites are not getting as much traffic, and so they have to kind of cease their operations. The web could just be a lot quieter of a place for content creation. How do you think Perplexity fits into that, and what do you think the web will look like in that era?” they added.
Srinivas had a blunt response. “The web is already pretty long tail, and there’s a massive power law. I feel like the power law is gonna get even more skewed. That is very obvious,” he said. Srinivas seemed to be saying that a small fraction of big websites currently get most of the web traffic, and he felt that this imbalance would be even more accentuated going forward.
“There are going to be certain brands that are well-known, and they’re gonna preserve direct, organic traffic. But those are trying to game the SEO system and trying to get traffic, I think they’re definitely gonna have a harder time,” he added.
The concerns around SEO in the age of AI have stemmed from the popularity of AI companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which trained on the entire corpus of the internet, and can now answer most questions. As such, people go directly to these platforms for answers to questions they earlier went to Google for, and Google then directed them to individual websites.
Srinivas, though, says that the impact might be doubly severe for smaller websites. Not only will the overall traffic from Google decrease, the impact on smaller publishers could be even worse. As such, the SEO ecosystem is looking to brace for the changes. Publishers have been tracking from sources like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ahrefs has even created a tool that lets websites see how often their content is cited by search engines. The world of SEO is no stranger to changes, thanks to the regular updates Google keeps making to its algorithm, but it might face its biggest challenge yet with AI.