Will we need to please ChatGPT or Perplexity more than Google tomorrow to attract visitors to our website? This is one of the major questions currently stirring the marketing world. And it will probably redefine the traditional rules of online SEO.
Will search engines be replaced by “answer engines”? This is the great concern of many marketing managers facing the planned and progressive decline of the web page and its counterpart, natural SEO.
The cause: the growing number of users who now favor artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, to the detriment of traditional players, foremost among which is the inevitable Google. The Mountain View firm has moreover taken the bull by the horns by announcing, during its traditional annual grand event, I/O 2025, on May 20th, the deployment in 200 countries and support for more than 40 languages of AI Overviews, its answer engine.
From showcase pages to databases
This module no longer displays links to websites but directly answers to questions asked by users. Unlike “Snippets” which, from 2016, displayed excerpts from a web page at the top of result pages (and led to what are called “0 click” searches), AI Overviews composes a synthesis from several sites. This could divert or even eliminate a significant portion of web traffic, even if Google denies it, in an attempt to reassure site publishers (who are also its main clients).
“We were fighting to be in the first three links of a search results page that contained 10, we will probably fight to be the unique entity or idea cited in the answer constructed by a language model delivered by a conversational interface,” predicts AI expert Olivier Martinez in his newsletter.
In other words: web pages tend to become databases for AIs rather than showcases for humans. This is evidenced by the arrival of new activities with various acronyms: generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) or artificial intelligence optimization (AIO).
Good practices… similar to traditional SEO
In a Wall Street Journal article, the international SEO director of email platform Mailchimp, Ellen Mamedov, notes this decline in audience and the obligation to update her strategy to better “serve” AI platform robots.
According to Mailchimp’s research, technical search elements, such as page loading speed and code snippets used to track user activity, are more important for these robots and AI-powered searches than for traditional search engines.
In an article published on its Search Central Blog, Google presented some good practices to adopt to improve SEO in the AI era… very close to the usual advice however:
- Create useful content (unique and non-commercial) for users
- Offer a pleasant browsing experience on all types of devices
- Ensure that Google properly indexes pages
- Ensure adequacy between structured data and visible content
- Focus on multimodal (textual, images, video) to strengthen visibility
Before specifying that we should expect to “evolve with its users”.
“The only predictable thing in the field of search is that it always evolves because people’s needs are constantly evolving,” Google concludes.
This is therefore only the beginning!
