“SEO is dead.”
This is a phrase that has been making the rounds online for quite some time. It’s also not true… for now.
So, I decided to survey a myriad of experts in the industry and hear their predictions: what is the future of SEO as a profession, and where are we headed in the next decade and beyond?
Here are the answers.
Key Findings
- Content creation (58.6%) is seen as the most AI-disrupted area of SEO in the next 10 years.
- Content writers (29.9%) are the most likely to be replaced by AI, though many believe AI won’t fully replace any roles (43.7%).
- The biggest SEO challenge in an AI-first future? Maintaining human creativity and authenticity (39.1%).
- Over 70% of surveyed experts believe organic traffic will decline due to Google’s AI Overviews and similar features.
- Nearly all (94%) SEOs believe that all agencies will provide AI search optimization services by 2035.
- Most respondents (70.1%) feel prepared for AI’s growing impact on the industry, but there’s still a skills gap to close.
Will AI Replace SEOs?
Let’s get the big question out of the way first. I asked 80+ experts working in the industry which SEO-related specialists are most at risk of displacement. What I found was hope.
| Job role | Votes |
| None: AI won’t fully replace anyone | 43.7% |
| Content writers | 29.9% |
| Outreach/link building specialists | 8.0% |
| Technical SEO experts | 6.9% |
| SEO strategists | 3.4% |
| Others | 8% |
The majority of respondents are not panicking about their skills going out of demand. The largest group of voters (43.7%) said that AI is simply a tool that won’t fully replace anyone.
“It won’t replace positions, but will shrink SEO teams, as one person will be able to do more, i.e., one content writer might be able to absorb the workload of 2/3 as content creation time is reduced with AI content writing.” — Laura Curto, Digital Content Manager, Infovista
Still, if any position was at risk, it’s content writers. They are seen as most vulnerable, according to nearly 30% of voters. The explosion of generative tools caters to text generation. Even in their mainstream infancy a few years ago, LLM models were already capable of creating long-form articles to rival most informational blog posts.
Automating content writing at scale is something many have experimented with already, myself included, to varying success. Google’s algorithm changes are largely why AI-generated writing can be such a huge hit-or-miss on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
At the end of the day, it’s up to people to define where the boundaries lie between human-computer collaboration in the SEO stack.
Which Aspects of SEO Will AI Impact the Most?
There is no online experience that hasn’t been touched by AI yet. When I polled digital experts on where AI left the deepest mark for them, the overwhelming consensus was that content creation has been impacted the most. Nearly six in ten respondents (58.6%) selected this as the top area of disruption.
| Area of expertise | Votes |
| Content creation | 58.6% |
| On-page optimization | 11.5% |
| Link building | 8.0% |
| Keyword research | 5.7% |
| Technical SEO | 5.7% |
| Others | 10.3% |
This goes along with the notion that writers are at the largest risk of job displacement. AI’s biggest strength is in its technical implementations, yet its most disruptive impact is on creative tasks.
“AI’s greatest impact will be on holistic strategy. It’s forcing the collapse of the silos that have traditionally separated these disciplines.” — Leury Pichardo, Director of Marketing, Digital Ceuticals
Shifting from human-led writing to machine-generated copy is already underway. The real question is, are we underestimating the power of unique human voices in favor of speed and scale?
The Biggest SEO Challenge: Creativity in the Age of Machines
While AI is helping us work faster, is our work getting more bland? When asked to mention the biggest challenge for SEO, about 40% of respondents said they worry that human originality will get lost in the AI content flood.
| Challenge | Votes |
| Maintaining creativity and authenticity | 39.1% |
| Adapting to AI search engines | 23% |
| Combating AI-generated spam/content | 20.7% |
| Proving ROI to stakeholders | 10.3% |
| Others | 6.9% |
Some see this as a challenge of positioning: How do we keep up with these technological changes? How do we make sure brands communicate in human ways and resonate emotionally if everything is done by machines?
Other voters worry about proving the usefulness of their own skillset to clients or stakeholders. After all, if AI can replace or automate most of what we do, are our skills still as valuable?
Organic Traffic Is Under Threat
There’s been much talk about the rise of the “zero-click” search economy. Both Google and consumers have changed how they surface and look for information.
According to studies, about 60% of all Google searches end without a click. When we add Google’s AI Overviews to the mix, the outlook looks even more pessimistic. A combined 70.1% of SEOs expect a decline in organic traffic, 47.1% of which think the drop will be significant.
| Prediction | Votes |
| Traffic will decrease significantly | 47.1% |
| Traffic will decrease slightly | 23.0% |
| Traffic will increase | 10.3% |
| Traffic will stay the same | 4.6% |
| Not sure | 3.4% |
| Others | 11.6% |
Informational sites, in particular, could suffer heavy losses, since AI can provide instant answers on top of the SERPs, thus bypassing the need to click on source links altogether. But some respondents pointed out that the impact may vary:
“It depends on the type of website, I imagine an e-commerce store would stay the same because people still want to look at different options, whereas a blog will likely lose traffic to AI Overviews.” — Harry Calladine, Head of SEO, Land of Rugs
Others are inclined to believe that we can only speculate about what changes are coming to search engines.
“I don’t think we’ll even have AI Overviews in 10 years. I think we’ll have conversational search portals.” — Kim Harris, PhD, Founder, Quantum Quill Digital
A Day in the Life of an SEO expert in 2035
Now, let’s try to paint a picture of what the work life of an SEO looks like in a decade. If the industry’s predictions are right, we won’t be doing the same tasks, using the same tools, or even measuring success the same way. Here’s a peek into the likely rhythms of a 2035 SEO career, based on 80+ experts.
SEO Will Still Be a Viable Career
Despite all the disruption, SEO as a profession isn’t vanishing. 67.8% of respondents are feeling positive about their future prospects and believe SEO jobs will still exist in 2035, with 43.7% feeling strongly confident about that.
But there is a unanimous agreement that the nature of our work will change. Instead of manual tasks like disavowing links or writing metadata, SEOs will spend their time:
- Overseeing AI-generated content and flagging issues in tone or query intent
- Designing search strategies across multi-modal platforms (text, voice, video, AI chat)
- Advising brands on search persona management in AI conversations
- Interpreting AI behavior patterns in order to understand how and why these interfaces surface certain answers
Most SEO Agencies Will Offer AI Services
94.2% of SEO professionals believe that by 2035, optimizing for AI search engines will be standard practice for them, with 79.3% strongly convinced. The term “Search Everywhere Optimization,” albeit not new, has been popping up more and more lately.
This is already happening, to an extent, but how far will it go? Online visibility has become fractured and spans well beyond traditional SERPs to social media, visual search, chat-based systems, and more. Some believe Google is too big to topple. Others have bolder predictions:
“SEO will evolve into ‘Agent Optimization’—making your business the obvious choice for AI assistants to recommend. Instead of optimizing for Google rankings, we’ll be optimizing for AI agent trust scores based on real customer outcomes, verified reviews, and business performance data. Companies will compete not for page views but for AI recommendation frequency. The SEO professionals who survive will be those who understand how to make their clients’ businesses so remarkable that AI agents can’t ignore them when making recommendations to users.” — Brandon George, Director of Demand Generation & Content, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
The Tradeoff: Efficiency vs. Creativity
There’s no denying AI will make our work faster, increase our output. But, according to 58.6% of surveyed SEOs, the creative spark will be harder to protect.
AI will, and for many it already does, handle briefs, outlines, keyword clustering, and even full-blown article drafts. The job of an SEO writer will be more geared toward injecting a human edge into machine output. We’ll be editing AI, injecting brand tone and storytelling into an otherwise generic sea of sameness.
Lifelong Learning Becomes Mandatory
When I asked respondents how prepared they felt for AI-driven changes, 70.1% of them expressed moderate to strong confidence in their skills.
The SEOs of 2035 will likely:
- Attend regular AI/SEO crossover workshops
- Train on prompt engineering and data labeling
- Subscribe to LLM model changelogs, much like we follow Google algorithm updates now
- Test AI-generated UX, not just rankings, as user behavior shifts
That said, nearly a third were neutral or said they felt unprepared for the changes to come. There is an urgent need for training and reskilling, an emphasis on ongoing education, if these experts are to remain competitive in the years ahead.
Final Thoughts
The death of SEO has been predicted many times before, but it’s not arriving any time soon. Nothing is staying the same—AI has rewritten the narrative, and we must keep up.
Is AI a replacement? An agentic collaborator? Or simply a useful tool? No matter what the future of SEO holds, new KPIs and new search frontiers await. Are you ready for the future where “appearing inside the AI” is the new “ranking on page one”?