Search traffic is down. AI Overviews are pushing results lower. Budgets are being slashed. Is this the end of SEO as we know it?
Not so fast.
I interviewed SMX Advanced speaker Eric Enge about the future of search, the rise of generative AI, and how SEOs can still win big in a rapidly changing landscape. Some of the topics covered:
- Why 35% traffic drops aren’t the end of the world.
- How AI-driven search changes what it means to “rank.”
- Why user engagement and brand signals matter more than ever.
- What to expect at SMX Advanced 2025 in Boston.
Reminder: SMX Advanced returns June 11-13 in Boston. Get your tickets now!
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Danny Goodwin: Hey everybody, this is Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land. I am lucky to be joined today by none other than Eric Enge. I think most everybody knows you by this point, but if you want to introduce yourself to the audience.
Eric Enge: I’ll be happy to do that. Hey everybody, Eric Enge here. I am president of Pilot Holding but probably best known for having been the lead author of “The Art of SEO,” one of if not the most popular book on the topic, and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, which was a very well-known brand back in the day, one of the more popular SEO agencies. We were at 70 people when we sold it so we had really good broad customer base. I’ve been in SEO for 25 years and change.
Danny Goodwin: And Eric has been at a lot of SMX Advanced shows over the years. Could you even count the number you’ve been at? I know we started in 2007, but have you been to pretty much all of them, haven’t you?
Eric Enge: I missed the first one because one of my children had a graduation.
Danny Goodwin: That’s a good reason to miss a show.
Eric Enge: It was like, I’m certainly not choosing the show over my child’s graduation, but boy, I wish I could do both of these things.
Danny Goodwin: And, this year SMX Advanced is back in person in Boston and Eric will be speaking at the show. And I want to take this opportunity before the show to have a quick chat with you about a few things that are going on in the industry and preview what you’ll be talking about at SMX.
Danny Goodwin: So, I figured a good place to start. There’s a lot of change going on right now in search, Google, and our entire industry. What do you think we all are doing right as an industry and adapting to all the changes and also what are we doing wrong as an industry right now?
Eric Enge: In a way, I think of it as two sides of the same coin, which is that I see a lot of people doing a really good job of adapting to the fact that just off the top, we, search traffic is probably down 35% for most sites or, that’s a common number and I’ve seen it across a wide array of sites. So, that’s a big thing to adapt to. But then there’s sort of some related aspects, which is how much did your conversion really drop? It didn’t drop 35%. Because you were giving away or not getting traffic, I should say that wasn’t converting for you anyway.
Eric Enge: So it’s complicated to sort all that out, but I think a lot of people are doing a pretty good job of understanding that the ground has shifted under their feet and we don’t even know where it’s shifting to really. And so that’s hard thing, to deal with that level of uncertainty. A bunch of people are doing it well. But I see a lot of people just head in the sand, not doing it well too, and that’s frustrating because the world changes all the time and we have to be prepared for and deal with that and guess what?
Eric Enge: So here’s the fun part. It’s got to be a fun part, right? This is the time when real winners are made. When everything’s changing around you and it’s unstable and nobody’s quite sure what to do and if you can be one of the ones that get it right or close to right early on, that’s how you become a winner, So, if you’re a true entrepreneur, it is a great time.
Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. Great point. So a lot of people are seeing the traffic decline. How do you see SEOs providing value beyond rankings as we head through the rest of this year and beyond?
Eric Enge: One of the bigger variables we have to deal with is that we just don’t know how much Google is going to shift. They have launched this AI Mode thing, which is sort of this pure chatbot search type experience like ChatGPT and so is that going to become the whole world or are there classes of queries where lists of websites is still a better answer. I happen to think there are queries that that’s true by the way, but it’s all shifting so much that it’s really hard to understand where it’s going to land.
Eric Enge: There are certain things that I think some people have begun to figure out about how ranking in a generative AI platform is different than Google search.
Eric Enge: And I could talk a little bit about that if you’re interested in so the way traditional Google determines relevance is they’ll take your search query and they’ll create an embedding vector for that and then they’ll compare that to the embedding vector that they have for your page. It’s a whole large subtopic of how embedding vector for a page is different than a query. But suffice it to say they have something a vector 768 dimensional vector or something like that that describes the content of a page and a similar one for the query and they see how relevant they are to each other, right? And if the vectors are really close like that, as opposed to like that they decide that it’s a potential page to rank and then they get into other aspects of the algorithm decide whether to rank it or not.
Eric Enge: But in the world of ChatGPT and AI mode and Perplexity – it’s different because in those platforms they want to return web pages that address all of the subtopics. So they do many comparisons and you want to score well on all of those comparisons to be the first one listed in ChatGPT or where ever.
Eric Enge: So the depth that you need to go into your content analysis changes and people who are going to optimize really well for that will probably still do very well in traditional search and now have a chance of ranking in from what I’ll call a GEO perspective.
Danny Goodwin: Awesome. A lot of people are talking about how citations are kind of on LLMs are more of the equivalent of what you need to rank, whereas now it’s been links for years and years. Links have been sort of everything. Do links even matter to LLMs?
Eric Enge: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think this is a little bit speculative my answer to be honest, but I don’t think that a link and a citation are going to be that different in how they’re weighted by ChatGPT. But I do think it’ll matter in Google because Google can see if it’s getting clicked on, right? Yeah.
Danny Goodwin: All right. What are you most excited about right now in SEO? There’s obviously a lot of doom and gloom. But what are we excited about?
Eric Enge: We have such a big opportunity in front of us. I kind of answered it a little bit when I talked about if you’re a true entrepreneur, times of disruptive change are when a lot of people lose money, and that’s sad. So I don’t want to overlook that part of it.
Eric Enge: But if you like being in the game, this is a great time to be doing stuff because there’s so much to be figured out – and if you get it figured out, you’re going to rock. You’re going to do really well. By the way, there’s a key assumption there I just want to mention really briefly, which you’re going to get less traffic, Just get over it. That’s OK. That’s just where we are. But the traffic you’re not getting is probably not the highest converting traffic you are getting to your site.
Eric Enge: So how much is it going to drag down your business? There’s probably a balance that still has to be figured out between the websites and the various platforms before it all settles out. But, people are still going to buy products and services and OpenAI isn’t providing those and Google isn’t providing those and Microsoft isn’t providing at least both of them that is you know what I mean?
Danny Goodwin: So is there anything that has you worried right now in SEO? Yes, there is a lot of opportunity. But there are AI Overviews. Zero clicks getting mentioned a lot lately. There’s been a lot of talk around budgets being slashed. It’s sort of chaotic right now for a lot of people. What in particular are you worried about, if anything?
Eric Enge: A lot of people, for varying reasons, are going to get hurt. I mean, I’ve stated the upside of it, the opportunity and all that, but not everybody’s going to respond. So, perfect example, you just mentioned it. Budgets are getting slashed, people are getting laid off. I’m not thinking that that’s the right response by the way for the great majority of people who are doing it because they have something to figure out and the number of buyers out there hasn’t really changed or whatever they have the mechanisms by which they reach those buyers are changing so… But unfortunately a lot of people are going to get hurt and that worries me And I don’t like that part of it at all. Yeah.
Danny Goodwin: Based on what you’re seeing and obviously all we’ve chatted about here, do you feel like SEO is heading toward a new growth period? Do you see it declining or maybe even reinventing itself? I know there’s been lots of debate about, GEO or generative engine optimization, whatever we want to call it. I think people are confusing, at least from my perspective, that we’re trying to rebrand SEO, but it just feels like it’s not a rebranding because SEO isn’t going anywhere. Google’s still getting 5 trillion searches a year. That’s a lot of search, but now there’s ChatGPT search, there’s all these other LLMs. How do you sort of see the current state of SEO? Do you think it’s going to grow, decline, reinvent itself in some new way?
Eric Enge: So I do think that the fastest driver of declines in clicks on what I’ll call traditional search rankings is going to be from what Google does itself. As soon as AI Mode becomes a standard option and even with AI Overviews growing, the traditional listings are getting pushed down. And we already talked about 35% reduction in traffic, so I think it just means there’s less opportunity there.
Eric Enge: Now mind you someone who gets satisfied by an AI Overview probably wasn’t a customer anyway. You’re probably going to lose some conversions out of it, don’t get me wrong. But there’s going to be a bigger premium on getting into the top three spots, right? 7, 8 and 10 that’s the equivalent of the third scroll on your browser today, right? So, I do think there’s going to be a bigger push to get those top positions and I do think that a very large percentage of people who think of themselves as SEOs will get into AEO, and whatever other -EOs we come up with.
Danny Goodwin: Let’s talk a little bit about SMX Advanced. You’ll be speaking. Your session is Google, E-E-A-T, and brand: Focusing on signals that actually fuel SEO growth. So for anyone watching who’s thinking about coming to SMX Advanced, what will you be talking about in your session?
Eric Enge: Yeah, I think people have been deeply concerned about E-E-A-T and brand for various reasons and in different ways for a long time and I think there’s been some misunderstanding about how they work. The concepts as expressed by Google E-E-A-T – expertise, experience, authoritiveness, and trust – they’re not really measuring those things directly. They’re measuring other things. And by the same token, I don’t think they don’t really measure brand directly either, but they’re measuring other things that brand helps drive.
Eric Enge: So that’s where we get into understanding that user engagement is a huge factor. I think a lot of people in the industry have believed that for many, many years now but now any lingering doubt has been thoroughly erased by the stuff that was shared a year plus ago. And so we really need to understand how user engagement matters and so I’m going to get into talking about that.
Eric Enge: Getting specific, sharing some case studies of cases where just optimizing content for better user engagement brought good results or optimizing content for higher relevance through using the same kind of analysis that Google does. Embedding vectors are just showing that these are the things that really matter, which by the way, if you think about them brand and E-E-A-T are things that help make those things better on your site but it isn’t that you put an author tag somewhere. You bought a big ad on a large news site or a TV ad – no, no, that’s not that Google isn’t actually thinking directly about those things.
Danny Goodwin: I’m looking forward to that – and I get the pleasure of moderating your session yet again. I don’t even know how many times I’ve been your moderator, but it’s always a pleasure and really looking forward to that session.
Danny Goodwin: SMX Advanced is in Boston this year, June 11 to 13. Get your tickets. We want to see you there. Come talk to Eric – he’s one of the smartest guys, been around the game forever. And it’s a very interesting time and he’ll help you kind of figure out what’s going on in that world. So, thanks Eric for joining us for this quick chat. we’ll see you in Boston, which is your hometown…
Eric Enge: Yes, it is.
Danny Goodwin: Where I grew up as well. So, it’s a homecoming for both of us.
Eric Enge: And everybody out there, you come up and talk to me after I talk, too. Happy to chat with anybody and talk about all this stuff. It’s just too much fun to think about.
Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. All right. Thanks again, Eric. Thanks, everybody.