SEO and AI

I’ve been thinking about search, lately. Marketers are wondering if SEO is dead in a world where people can chat directly with an AI. But the issue may extend beyond search into the nature of society itself.

This morning I asked Claude 3 to explain complex topics in sociology using examples from the isekai genre. In isekai, there’s usually an adventurer’s guild with a ranking system, which happens to be a good example of generalized symbolic media. That sort of thing. That text didn’t exist in the world until I asked the AI to write about that topic using that particular context.

And because the ideas relate to isekai stories which I think about often, it becomes easier for me to assimilate and accommodate the ideas of sociology.

Before large language models became commonplace, I decided what to read based on search. One’s page rank on Google is “generalized symbolic media” that simplifies communication and motivates people to engage with and recreate a social system. An entire social system arose to write more and more articles that would match users’ web queries so marketers could sell widgets.

Not needed anymore. No matter how many articles are written, LLMs will be able to fill in the latent space between those articles. I don’t need generalized symbolic media to simplify communication. I just need an LLM.

Which is not to say that web pages and search are going away completely. If nothing else I predict that people are going to learn new ideas quickly, and they’ll be able to build upon that foundation quickly. They’ll still write articles and share their viewpoints. It’ll just be easier for the rest of us to understand what they’re trying to say.