Weekly Digest #156, 20 Dec 2025
If you're a publisher or digital professional, the last year has been a whirlwind of anxiety and confusion, as every available data point shows that they generate almost no click-through traffic to cited websites. What does this mean for our traffic and our SEO strategy?
Will AI kill SEO?
Forget "GEO": Cutting Through the AI Hype
If you're a publisher or digital professional, the last year has been a whirlwind of anxiety and confusion, as every available data point shows that they generate almost no click-through traffic to cited websites. While referral traffic from LLMs is actively decreasing, the hectic rise of LLMs has everyone asking the same question: What does this mean for our traffic and our SEO strategy?
This week, a conversation between SEO and marketing experts, Barry Adams and Steven Wilson-Beales, cuts through that noise. They discuss the evolving landscape of digital publishing, asserting that while AI is not killing SEO, it has fundamentally shifted the industry into a zero-sum game. They emphasise that publishers must move beyond a "forgettable commodity" model to survive and advocate a focus on brand loyalty, a unique editorial voice, and platform diversification across YouTube and Reddit.
Chasing "ChatGPT SEO" is a Fool's Errand
They dismiss the current hype around Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) as a "fool's errand".The new wave of AI tracking tools promising to measure brand mentions and rankings within LLM responses is providing what can only be described as "deceptive data." There's nothing wrong with brands willing to be cited or mentioned more in LLMS, but tracking something that relies on probability/personalisation, where many searches are likely to be unique, is unlikely to yield the benefits they may expect. Making strategic decisions based on these metrics is a recipe for failure.
If you are asking how your brand can show up in ChatGPT, you might be chasing the wrong metrics and investing in the wrong tools, and if your website depends on users visiting your web pages, optimising for LLMs is probably the worst waste of resources you can make.
The critical shift isn't a sudden, AI-driven collapse in traffic; it's the flatlining of Google's referral growth.
While AI Overviews are a real and undeniable threat that reduces clicks from search results, they are not the biggest danger to publishers today. A more familiar and devastating threat remains a far greater risk: Google's traditional core algorithm updates. The difference is a matter of scale. AIOs may cannibalise clicks for specific queries, but a negative core algorithm update can cause a publisher to "lose 20, 30, 40% of their traffic" overnight. This is a far more existential blow.
The actual risk for publishers in the AI era is not just losing clicks to a summary box; it is allowing their brand to become a "forgettable commodity publisher" that Google's core ranking systems no longer deem authoritative enough to surface at all. The hype tells you to ask, "How do I show up in AI?" The real question is, "What operational problem can I solve that makes my business indispensable?"
