I have been doing online marketing and e-commerce since 2005, when I launched MarketOnline (an online store in Romania). I remember when “SEO” meant repeating your keyword ten times in the footer, then mobile and the social networks that were supposed to “kill” search. They did not. And with Retargeting, the marketing automation platform I built with Rareș Bănescu, I saw from the inside how much an online store depends on traffic from search.
Now we are going through another shift, probably the biggest one yet: search engines no longer return just ten blue links, but answers written by AI. I keep hearing the same question: “Is SEO still worth the investment?” The short answer is yes, but not in the same way. The long answer follows.
What has actually changed
In May 2024 Google launched AI Overviews in the US: an AI-generated summary shown above the classic results. Over the year it expanded them to more countries and languages. The start was not glorious: a few answers went viral for the wrong reasons, like the famous suggestion to add glue to pizza so the cheese would not slide off. Google adjusted the system, but the direction stayed the same.
At the same time, search started moving into chat. OpenAI launched ChatGPT search on 31 October 2024, and in early February 2025 opened it to everyone, including people without an account. Perplexity grew as an “answer engine” that gives you a text with sources instead of a list of pages. And in January, DeepSeek’s R1 model grabbed the whole world’s attention and showed how quickly tools like these can appear and spread.
Fewer clicks, but better ones
For simple informational questions, the user gets the answer right there and clicks nowhere. So-called “zero-click” search is not new, but AI is speeding it up. If your business lived off traffic to articles like “how long to boil an egg” or “what is cash-basis VAT”, you will feel it.
The good news: for complex and commercial queries, things look different. When someone is comparing three washing machines, looking for a trustworthy supplier or ready to buy, an AI summary is not enough. People want to see the product, the price, the delivery terms, the reviews. And whoever lands on your site after reading a summary arrives better informed and closer to a decision. Less traffic, but more qualified. For an online store, that is not necessarily bad news.
What still holds (and matters even more)
AI does not invent information; it takes it from somewhere. The question is: from whom? From what I have seen, from sources that have something to say and say it clearly. That means:
- Real experience and expertise. Google has been talking about E-E-A-T for years: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. A text written by someone who actually used the product, solved the problem or works in the field has an edge over a generic compilation.
- Original content and your own data. A study, a test, a ranking you built, a number only you have: these are the things AI tools cite. An article rewritten from ten other articles adds nothing new, for people or for machines.
- Clear structure. Headings that say what comes next, a direct answer in the first lines of each section, then the details. FAQ sections written for people, not as filler.
- Structured data (schema). Markup for products, prices, reviews, FAQs or articles helps engines understand exactly what is on the page. It is boring technical work, but you do it once and it keeps working for you for a long time.
A few years ago I wrote about content marketing that sells. The conclusion still stands: content worth reading is content that answers a real question better than anyone else. AI just makes the difference more visible.
Your brand is also built outside your website
An AI model forms an opinion about you from everything it finds on the web: reviews, forums, comparison sites, press articles, social media discussions. If your name shows up often and in a good context, your chances of being mentioned in an answer go up. If it does not show up at all, you do not exist.
So it pays to be present where answers are formed: ask happy customers for reviews, answer questions in the forums of your niche, make sure you appear correctly on comparison sites and relevant marketplaces. This is the PR and reputation work many people treated as a nice-to-have. Now it is part of SEO.
The technical side: speed, access and a decision about AI crawlers
The fundamentals have not changed: a fast site that works well on mobile, pages that can be crawled and indexed, no important content hidden in scripts that bots cannot read.
There is, however, a new decision to make: what do you do with AI companies’ crawlers? Through your robots.txt file you can allow or block the bots that collect content for model training or for search. The trade-off is easy to describe and hard to decide. Block them and you protect your content, but you risk not being cited in those tools’ answers. Allow them and your content may be used without always getting a click in return. A publisher living off articles may choose differently from an online store that wants to be recommended. What matters is deciding consciously and checking that you are not accidentally blocking exactly the bots that would put you in front of customers.
Measure differently
If you only look at organic sessions, you may draw the wrong conclusions. A customer who heard about you in an AI answer may come back later by searching your name directly, or arrive through another channel. That is why I would track:
- branded searches and how they evolve over time;
- assisted conversions, not just the last click;
- traffic coming from tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, however small or large it is;
- the quality of visits: how long people stay, what they buy, what they are worth, not just how many there are.
It is similar to what happened when third-party cookies started going away: perfect measurement no longer exists, so you build a picture from several sources and accept that some things are estimates.
Do not depend on a single platform
The lesson I have been repeating for years is more relevant than ever: if all your traffic comes from one place, your business is in someone else’s hands. Google changes its algorithm, a social network changes its rules, an AI assistant decides to recommend someone else. The channels you own, meaning your email list, your community, your app, your returning customers, are the only ones nobody can take away overnight. They are worth working for.
And yes, use AI in your own work too. I have written about how I use ChatGPT in business, and I believe AI agents will change how people buy, not just how they search. But if you use it to mass-produce generic text, you are creating exactly the kind of content AI has no reason to cite.
No panic, no gimmicks
As with every shift, “experts” selling miracle recipes for showing up in AI answers have already appeared. I have seen this movie many times: the tricks work for a few months, then they backfire. And let us keep things in proportion: Google remains, for now, by far the most used search engine. Chat is growing, but it has not replaced it.
Here is what I would do as an online business owner: keep investing in good, original content, fix the technical fundamentals, look after my reputation beyond my own site, measure more intelligently and build channels I own. It does not sound spectacular. But that is what SEO that lasts has looked like for the past 20 years. And I would use AI as a writing aid, not a replacement, as I described in what AI taught me about productivity.
What are you seeing? Has your search traffic dropped, or have customers told you they found you through an AI assistant?