The End of Traditional SEO? How AI Search Is Changing Everything for Small Businesses
Google isn't going anywhere. But the way people find you online has quietly, fundamentally shifted, and most small businesses haven't noticed yet. Remember when getting on page one of Google felt like the whole game? You'd obsess over keywords. You'd pay someone to audit your site. You'd read endless articles about backlinks and meta descriptions and whether your images had the right alt text. And for a long time, that actually worked. Something changed. Quietly. Over the past year or two, millions of people stopped typing queries into a search box and started asking questions, real questions, conversational ones, to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. And those tools answer. Directly. No clicking required. So here's the uncomfortable truth for anyone still playing the old SEO game: the person who might have found your business on page one of Google is now getting a recommendation from an AI. And that AI may or may not mention you at all. What ...